The Big Show

Slapstick comedy isn't my bag, so ordinarily I wouldn't tolerate more than a few seconds of Ice Cube's antics in the cloying holiday flick Are We There Yet? But here I am, mouth agape before a 55-inch, $13,000 plasma screen, watching the AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted rapper take a pratfall into a statue of Paul Bunyan. And moments later, when he learns the true meaning of family and tops off his corny epiphany by hugging two doe-eyed moppets, I'm not cynically rolling my eyes - I'm enthralled.

I don't budge when the clip has run its course, but wait for it to cue up again. Then a third time, at which point I start to worry that I've developed a taste for Hollywood pabulum. On a home theater setup like the Sony rig before me, with its enveloping screen and muscular speakers, even the lamest sitcom can seem like Citizen Kane.

A grinning PR rep snaps me out of my happy trance. "Some picture on this one," he says. But have I seen the 70-inch Qualia 006 rear-projection TV, the company's latest pride and joy?

Honestly, I can't recall. It's just day one of the Custom Electronic Design and Installation Association Expo, and already my occipital lobes are fried. Indianapolis' RCA Dome and the surrounding Indiana Convention Center are filled with booths where leggy spokesmodels and dowdy salespeople hawk screens, speakers, projectors - even cushy theater seats. Cedia is the Super Bowl of hooked-up homes, a frenetic preview of the rec-room luxuries that will air on MTV Cribs next year.

The convention draws nearly 25,000 A/V aficionados. Most are technicians who wire McMansions with concert-worthy audio gear and blackboard-sized LCDs. They roam the dome in search of gadgetry to foist upon their deep-pocketed clients, from the mundane (flat cables that don't bulge behind drywall) to the extravagant (the world's first 300-inch acrylic projection screen). When they're not comparing specs on plastic-screen mounts, installers attend seminars with names like "Project Management Boot Camp." Or they shot-put amps at the Installer Olympics.

The heart of Cedia is the demos. Dawdle at a vendor booth for more than 15 seconds and you're ushered into a darkened room with carpeted walls. A sales rep delivers a 15-minute spiel on the virtues of 100-watt tweeters or digital light processing. What follows is a sensory assault - Finding Nemo turtles whoosh through the Gulf Stream in high-definition splendor, cannon fire shakes the walls, or Diana Krall croons louder than a 767 prepping for takeoff.

I get my demo initiation (and a daylong ringing in my ears) from a man in a button-down denim shirt representing Thiel Audio. He catches me lingering over a brochure-strewn table and insists I follow him into a pitch-black chamber where a clip of Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers is playing.

"Come up here next to the screen," he beckons, then suddenly maxes out the volume when I'm just 10 inches from the ViewPoint speaker affixed to the wall. I believe he tries to tell me something about how there isn't any "reflection" of the sound, but I can't say for sure. All I hear are the death screams of orcs, even hours later.

My next stop is the Earthquake Sound demo, which is showing off its 400-pound Titan speakers encased in cherrywood cabinets the size of coffins. Joseph Sahyoun, Earthquake's lead designer and president, is proud of - even smug about - his mammoth creation: "When we were done with this thing," he says, "even we were impressed."

And I have to admit, I am too. I'd never given Norah Jones a second thought until I heard "Come Away With Me" pumped through the Titans. Their 800-Hz supertweeters reveal the subtlest nuances - the piano's minor-key timbre, the cymbals' shimmer. Discerning the seductive way Jones smacks her lips between measures, I instantly develop a schoolboy crush.

As if such rich sound weren't enough to sell the Titans, Sahyoun brags about the speakers' ability to take a punch. He repeatedly pounds one of the exposed woofer cones with his fist while telling me, "Our market is anyone with an annual income of $1 million." (Wham!) "Football players." (Wham!) "Baseball players." (Wham!) At that point he trails off, unsure who else might pay $25,000 for speakers … and then beat on them.

Price-tag porn is integral to Cedia fun. The longest demo queue snakes around a Temple of Nike replica erected by Runco International, a home-theater company known for high-quality projectors and an aversion to bargains. The joke goes that Runco salespeople have never seen a price they can't inflate. At least the money is being put to good use: Runco has spruced up the ancient Greece motif by hiring a human statue to stand motionless atop an Olympic victory platform.

As they wait in the Runco line, installers gossip about the outrages they've seen: the $80,000 speakers; the $13,000 leather sofa with cup holders; the $500,000 home theater built to look exactly like the bridge of the Enterprise, right down to the dials and knobs on Lieutenant Uhura's console. One installer boasts of a $2 million project that included lining a client's walls with Kevlar and the skin of manta rays.

There seems to be no limit to the amount of money manufacturers expect us to shell out in pursuit of home A/V perfection. Cedia vendors claim that no self-respecting audio- or cinephile can survive with just a $50,000 plasma screen and some outrageously expensive audio gear. "If you're going to spend $15,000 on a set of speakers, you want to make sure your room sounds good, right?" asks one merchant pushing rolls of Audioseal's sound insulation.

"We solve a problem that the rich and famous and elite didn't even know they had," says David Brooks of DWIN Electronics as he pitches a video extension system that can carry a hi-def signal up to 100 feet. "Let's say you're a mogul and you want a plasma screen in your bedroom, but your wife is, like, I don't want all that video equipment. So you just run a single cable up from the basement and you're done. It solves the problem we'd all like to have." By which he means the terrible problem of owning too many plasma screens.